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A comment on The Lie That Facebook Sold You. Parent comment

Re:The Lie That Facebook Sold You by nemothekid on Tuesday November 08, 2022 @02:04PM (#33522884)
This take is so interesting; Douyin is the way it is because of government regulation. If the US tried to regulate what you can see on Instagram, many people would cry bloody murder.

Bytedance doesn't make Chinese TikTok "educational" from the goodness of their heart. Chinese companies were happy to let teenagers play video games from dusk till dawn until the CCP got involved, not because Tencent wants American teens hooked on league and Chinese teens studying.

TikTok is always painted as some masterclass psychological Chinese weapon instead of it just being a failure of our own American government to do anything but stalemate and worry about bathrooms. There is no reason to believe that if TikTok is banned that Instagram wont supplant it in serving up the same garbage to users (except no one would complain because the gripe about TikTok is xenophobia for most people, not any principled stance on entertainment).

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Lie That Facebook Sold You by kridsdale2 on Tuesday November 08, 2022 @02:26PM (#33523138)
It's worth examining how much of the current failure and stalemating in the US government is the deliberate product of mass foreign psy-op campaigns, conducted significantly via social media, to undermine the quality of the electoral field, and the electorate itself.
[ Parent | on HN ]